Biographies

PhD Alicia Dickenstein is a professor at the Departament of Mathematics of the Faculty of Exact and Natural Sciences of Universidad de Buenos

Aires, where she held the position of Director during the 1996-1998 period. She is a Researcher for CONICET, where she was vice-president of the Comisión Asesora de Matemática in 2003. She has been Guest Professor at Paris VI, Paris 7, Bordeaux and Poitiers universities (France), the City University in Hong Kong (China), the Stockholm University (Sweden), the Universidade de São Paulo in São Carlos (Brazil), the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute (Berkeley, USA), the Institute for Mathematics and its Applications (Minneapolis, USA) and the Statistical and Applied Mathematical Sciences Institute (Research Triangle Park, USA). She has also been a guest scientist at the ETH Zurich (Switzerland), the Cornell, Pennsylvania and Berkeley universities (USA) and the INRIA Sophia Antipolis (France).

Dickenstein is currently working on Algebraic Geometry and its applications, a subject on which she has co-organised several international congresses. Her publications include not only numerous research articles in prestigious magazines and chapters in books on her specialty but also textbooks on mathematics for children aged 9-12.

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Ariel Pacetti earned his BA in Mathematical Sciences from the Universidad

de Buenos Aires and his PhD in Mathematics from the University of Texas at Austin. He is currently a Professor at the Universidad de Buenos Aires and a Researcher for CONICET. His area of work is the Number Theory, more specifically the study of elliptic curves over number fields.

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Bruno Mesz has a BA in Mathematical Sciences from the Universidad de

Buenos Aires. A pianist specialised in contemporary music, he has given concerts at the CETC (Centro de Experimentación del Teatro Colón), Teatro General San Martín, Centro Cultural Recoleta, BKA Theater (Berlin), Palacio de Festivales (Santander) and Williams Hall (Boston), among others. Mesz carries out research on sound perception at the Universidad Nacional de Quilmes (Argentina), where he is a Professor.

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Ernesto Mordecki Pupko earned his BA and Master’s degrees in Mathematics from the Universidad de la República (University of the Republic, Uruguay), and his PhD from the Russian Academy of Sciences. Mordecki Pupko is a professor at the Science Faculty of the Universidad de la República and a Researcher for the Programa para el Desarrollo de las Ciencias Básicas, PEDECIBA (Basic Sciences Development Program). In addition to his scientific works, he has published a significant number of didactic works on various areas of mathematics, in particular, on his specialty: probability and statistics, stochastic processes and financial mathematics. His original contributions are internationally renowned. At present, he is also coordinator of the Master’s degree in Engineering Mathematics of the Universidad de la República. He has carried out academic management, undertaking diverse responsibilities such as the interaction between mathematics and other disciplines, especially finances, economy and engineering.

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Gabriel Acosta is a PhD in Mathematical Sciences from Universidad de

Buenos Aires (UBA), a member of CONICET and a Professor at the Mathematics Department of the Faculty of Exact and Natural Sciences of the UBA. Acosta is currently carrying out research work in the field of numerical analysis of differential equations and the study of inequalities for differential equations. He has been involved in several accredited research projects and has published many articles in specialised magazines of different countries.

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Gregory Chaitin is an American mathematician of Argentine parents.

Internationally renowned in the fields of mathematics and computing, he is currently working at the IBM Watson Research Centre in New York. Chaitin is an Honorary Visiting Professor at the Department of Computer Science of the University of Auckland, New Zealand, and Honorary Professor at the University of Buenos Aires. Well-known for his discovery of the Omega number, Chaitin has made significant contributions to algorithmic information theory and metamathematics, in particular a new incompleteness theorem similar in spirit to Gödel's incompleteness theorem. He is a member of the Académie Internationale de Philosophie des Sciences (Belgium) and the Academia Brasileira de Filosofia (Rio de Janeiro), the Honorary President of the scientific committee of the Instituto de Sistemas Complejos de Valparaíso (Chile), and a permanent member of the Rutgers University Center for Discrete Mathematics & Theoretical Computer Science (DIMACS). In 1995 he was given the degree of Doctor of Science Honoris Causa by the University of Maine.

Gregory Chaitin has authored many books, among which are “Algorithmic Information Theory”, “The Limits of Mathematics”, “The Unknowable”, “Exploring Randomness”, “From Philosophy to Program Size”, “Thinking about Gödel and Turing - Essays on Complexity, 1970-2007” and “Meta Math! The Quest for Omega”.

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Guillermo Martínez is a writer and a mathematician. He has a PhD from the Universidad de Buenos Aires (UBA) and has pursued postdoctoral studies in Oxford. He was a Professor of Logic and Algebra at the UBA and a Researcher for CONICET.

Martínez has authored a book of short stories, “Infierno Grande”, and the novels “Acerca de Roderer”, “La Mujer del Maestro”, “Crímenes Imperceptibles” (published in Spain as “Los Crímenes de Oxford” and brought to the screen by director Alex de la Iglesia), and “La Muerte Lenta de Luciana B.”, which was chosen as one of the top ten books of the year in Spain. He also wrote the books of essays “Borges y la Matemática”, “La fórmula de la Inmortalidad” and “Gödel (para todos)”, the latter in collaboration with Gustavo Piñeiro. Martinez’s work has earned him high accolade from the critics and has been translated into five languages.

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Gustavo Piñeiro holds a BA in Mathematical Sciences from the Universidad de

Buenos Aires. He is currently a Professor at different universities and colleges, and has been taking part in the development of high school textbooks for many years. Piñeiro is also a regular collaborator of science popularisation magazines as well as publications on logic and ingenuity games.

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Javier Etcheverry is currently doing research work in the industry field and teaches at the Faculty of Exact and Natural Sciences of the Universidad de Buenos Aires (UBA). He has a PhD in Mathematical Sciences and a BA in Physics from the UBA. Etcheverry specialises in the subject of mathematical modelling and its applications.

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John Allen Paulos is a highly praised author, renowned public speaker and at present monthly columnist for ABCNews.com (and formerly for The Guardian). He is a Professor of mathematics at Temple University in Philadelphia and holds a PhD from the University of Wisconsin.

His writings include “A Mathematician Reads the Newspaper”, “Once Upon a Number”, “A Mathematician Plays the Stock Market” and the recently released “Irreligion”. He's also written scholarly papers on probability, logic, and the philosophy of science as well as OpEds, book reviews, and articles in publications such as the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Forbes, Nation, Discover, American Scholar, and London Review of Books.

The audiences he has addressed range from those in classrooms to members of the Smithsonian Museum, from NASA and the National Academy of Sciences to college gatherings, including the commencement assembly at the University of Wisconsin. Paulos has appeared frequently on radio and television, including a BBC adaptation of “A Mathematician Reads the Newspaper” and appearances on the Lehrer News Hour, 20/20 and Larry King’s and David Letterman’s shows. In 2002 he received the University Creativity Award and in 2003 the American Association for the Advancement of Science award for promoting public understanding of science.

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Luis Caffarelli is one of the world’s most prominent mathematicians.

Born in Buenos Aires, Argentina, he earned his PhD in Mathematics from the Universidad de Buenos Aires (UBA, University of Buenos Aires) and he was later a Professor at the University of Minnesota, the Courant Institute in New York, the University of Chicago and the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey.

Caffarelli is currently a Professor at the University of Texas at Austin, and a member of many professional associations, including the United States National Academy of Sciences and the Pontifical Academy of Sciences. He is Doctor Honoris Causa from the École Normale Supérieure in Paris, the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid and the Universidad Nacional de La Plata (Argentina); and Honorary Professor of the UBA. He has been awarded many prizes, including the Bôcher Memorial and the Steele Prizes by the American Mathematical Society, the Diamond Konex and the Rolf Schock Prize by the Swedish Royal Adacemy of Science.

His main areas of interest are nonlinear analysis and partial differential equations. For over thirty years, Luis Caffarelli has been the world’s leading expert in free boundary problems for nonlinear partial differential equations, and has made significant contributions to the study of fully nonlinear elliptic equations, in particular the Monge-Ampère equation, and in fluid dynamics, the Navier-Stokes equation. Caffarelli’s innovative methods have led to the successful resolution of many classic problems faced by mathematicians for ages.

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Marco Avellaneda is a Professor of Mathematics and the Director of the Division of Financial Mathematics at New York University’s Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences. He began his career in Wall Street as vice-president of the Morgan Stanley Derivative Products Group, and later on he held the positions of portfolio manager in equity volatility Strategies at Gargoyle Strategic Investments LLC, Head of Volatility Arbitrage at Capital Fund Management and, more recently, Portfolio Manager in quantitative equity strategies at the Galleon Group in New York.

He is widely known in the financial field as the inventor of the Uncertain Volatility model and for his work on the Weighted Monte Carlo algorithm and the theory of Dispersion Trading, as well as for several other papers in quantitative finance and derivatives. Marco has extensive experience in the fields of derivatives, quantitative strategies in equities and volatility trading from the point of view of hedge funds and Wall Street firms. He is also in the editorial boards of Communications on Pure and Applied Mathematics, the International Journal for Theoretical and Applied Finance and Quantitative Finance. He has authored the textbook “Quantitative Modelling of Derivative Securities: From Theory to Practice” and edited several other books and conference proceedings.

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Pablo Amster holds a PhD in Mathematical Sciences from the Universidad de

Buenos Aires (UBA), where he is currently a Professor at the Department of Mathematics of the Faculty of Exact and Natural Sciences. He is a Researcher for CONICET. Amster has written numerous scientific research papers in the area of differential equations, and collaborates in different projects with local and overseas universities. In addition, he frequently addresses conferences and seminars and writes texts geared towards the general public. He has published, among others, the books “La Matemática Como Una de las Bellas Artes”, “Mucho, Poquito, Nada”, “Un Pequeño Paseo Matemático” and “Fragmentos de un Discurso Matemático”.

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Pablo Groisman holds a PhD in Mathematical Sciences from the Universidad de Buenos Aires (UBA). His postdoctoral research work centres around the study of evolution processes, not only from a deterministic point of view but also from the perspective of stochastic modelling. He has also worked with partial differential equations and non-parametric statistics.

Groisman is a Professor at the Faculty of Exact and Natural Sciences of the UBA and a Researcher for CONICET.

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Ricardo Durán earned his PhD in Mathematical Sciences at the Universidad de Buenos Aires (UBA) and pursued postdoctoral studies at the University of Chicago. He specialises in Numerical Analysis, a subject on which he has written many papers. Durán has taken part in many congresses on the subject and has lectured at several local and overseas universities. He is the first Argentine mathematician living in Argentina to have been invited to lecture at the ICM, International Congress of Mathematicians (Madrid, 2006). He was awarded the Luis A. Santaló prize by the Academia Nacional de Ciencias Exactas, Físicas y Naturales –National Academy of Exact, Physical and Natural Sciences– of which he is a member. Ricardo Durán is currently a Researcher for CONICET and a Professor at the Faculty of Exact and Natural Sciences of the UBA.

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